"A quick update...Joseph is nowhere to be found. Both Pierre and Katrina checked into the hospital this week. And Brett, who was scheduled to be baptized this Saturday, went from being so pumped and ready for his baptism to dropping us and blocking us on all outlets so we have no way of contacting him. But things are going great!"

and this "She has been smoke-free for 4 months while her husband is in the process of quitting as well"

What kind of delusion are these young missionaries under? Your contacts are all smoking, drug-using, rehab-seeking ("in the hospital") individuals who get cold feet and suddenly cut off all contact with the missionary when a baptism date is set....oh, those are not signs of "Golden Converts!"

The only good thing for LDS, Inc is that the missionary believes "things are going great!" IF that missionary is still active 1 month, 6 months, 2 years, 5+ years after returning from the Field.

May it not be so.

Their "message" is in their medium. They are preaching to themselves and using others as a medium to recommit themselves. My kids are excited to see their Mormonism in action on a mission. One is right now and miracles abound.

"Tender Mercies and Minor Miracles"

Miniscule mercies and tenuous miracles.

Likely the miserable missionary is thinking, "This week has been the pits but I need to write that things are going great to avoid a call from the mission president" .

One of my nephews emails were the same. He'd tell us about the golden contact that was set for baptism, but when they went to pick him up, he was passed out drunk in the yard....again....so they had to reschedule.

Or the golden contact had mental illness issues and kept going on and off about baptism....but they were getting close.

Or the smoker that promised to quit....but didn't.

Or about how his own health issues that were about killing him were no problem and if he died riding his bike to a drunk investigators house it would be so great. His mom finally talked to the mission mom on the phone, realized the family has a history of gall stones or something like that, pulled him out, sent him home and had it fixed by medical professionals.

I won't even comment on the bizarre and strange wedding reception he had a couple years later.

We had an apparently golden convert set for baptism in my last few months of 'activity'. I attend and was even on branch presidency, but I hated it and was leaving after Christmas.
Anyway night of this girls baptism she just never turned up. Nobody knew why. I went out clubbing that night with some friends. Guess who we bump into. This girl who was supposed to be baptised. Said she had second thoughts. Next thing you know we went home together and broke the law of chastity twice hahaha.

LOL...in the process of quitting smoking.

This guy has a bright future as a TSCC PR writer or apologist.

Here's the one that gets me, and it seems to involve 2nd World Spanish-speaking countries:

You and your companion come across a golden couple, he has a steady job, she is a homemaker and they have four kids. Then it turns out that he was a previously married, with no kids, never bothered to get a divorce, and has been "living in sin" with the mother of his children for the past 14 years. So when they commit to baptism, Mormon church rules say "nuh-uh!"

What the rules and regulations are and eventually you push them into getting him divorced and then getting them married. So there is a wedding reception at the chapel on a Friday night, they get baptized the next morning and confirmed on Sunday.

Where was their repentance?

The same goes for the cigarette smokers, the coffee drinkers and the wine imbibers! "Please just go one day without smoking/drinking and we'll dunk you! Then you can work on a permanent repentance when you're a member! We need the stats!!!"

And how many baptisms are the result of an unconverted investigator just not having the balls to say no?

Too bad they don't let the missionaries sell alarm systems, along with mormonism. That way they'd probably eat better.

Actually, there are alarm companies that target RMs for jobs. We get them going door to door here. I had to deal with them when an older friend of ours was getting sucked in with a hard sell. Guy kept coming back. She asked my advice and I talked to them and knew right off. I asked the guy "where did you do your two" and he thought he was going to have someone that would help him sell. Uh no. He told me that lots of the guys he worked with were RMs and the company loved to hire them because they had so much experience. Sigh. After I told him I did my research and resigned (he had no idea you could do such a thing) he couldn't leave fast enough and he left my friend alone.

When I was a missionary we had a woman and her late teen daughter on the verge of baptism. The daughter was a very round girl. One day I saw her from an angle that made me suspect she wasn't just rotund. I was only 20 years old and not equipped to ask what I needed to know without embarrassing both of us. I stammered, hesitated, hemmed and hawed, blushed and finally got the words out. "Are you pregnant?"

She looked at the floor and nodded.

"Oh, then you can't be baptized."

Her mother was upset. "But she needs her sins washed away!"

I didn't know what the policy was about being baptized sometime after having the baby, what sort of interviews, shaming and repentance would be required. But I knew both my companion and I would probably be transferred before any of that was settled. And the local ward didn't seem at all interested in having these two in "their church," so they wouldn't be any following up. All I could do was repeat, "I'm sorry, you can't be baptized."

Then there were the two boys a different set of elders had baptized and we had to re-baptize because the surname they used when they were baptized the first time wasn't their legal name. They'd been using their mother's maiden name rather than her ex-husband's surname. That event led to one of the little holes in my testimony. The MP was the one who said they needed to be re-baptized, which seemed right at the time because the church is such a stickler about record keeping. But a visiting GA said they didn't, that we baptize the person, not the name. Yeah, right, the Lord's house is a house of order. At least we got credit for two baptisms. Because THAT'S what's important.

The missionaries in our ward had a couple who wanted to get baptized. They had been living together for about 20 years and had 3 children. The missionaries told them they had to live apart 3 days before they could join the church. They said " Why ". It makes no sense....that's not repentance

at the same time. We met them all when we were proselytizing at the Bellevue residential care facility.

Ralph is the first one we met and he introduced us to the other 4 people living inside his head. Bertram is the most resistant and sometimes acts out violently when we suggest that Ralph should be baptized. Molly is afraid of Bertram, but in quiet moments agrees that baptism is a good idea. Herbie seems to be more excited about it than Ralph, actually. Herbie likes aquatic sports. Jake just says "cool...whatevuh" whenever we talk to him.

We're confident that we can turn Bertram around. It was a miracle that God led us to Ralph, so that we could meet all of these other golden investigators at the same time. We're trying to get advance permission from the relevant authorities so that we'll be able to get the baptism done right away when the time is right.

Spreading the Lord's Gospel and getting results like this really fires up our testimonies. We know this work is true. That's all for today's report.